The Shakespeare Incident Read online

  “You like?”

  “You’ve got talent,” Denise said.

  “I did.”

  Suddenly, they heard a loud knocking on the back door of the museum.

  “That’s him!” Nastia said. “And he knows the alarm code. He used to be a guard here till he got fired.”

  Denise nodded. “I’ll handle this.” She gestured to Nastia to remain behind her and then opened the back door to reveal Fally in the flesh. Fally was morbidly obese in his so-called “wife-beater” tank top, but still able to move like a Sumo wrestler. The museum floor literally shook under his feet, some sculptures vibrated on their perches.

  Sure enough, he had the same GROUNDLINGS tattoo. The three bloody tear drops under his eyes showed that he must have earned his stripes. He was clearly not impressed by the petite young woman in charcoal with a pink streak in her hair who blocked his path.

  “Where’s my wife?” he yelled. “I got to see her!”

  It was hard to describe what she sensed from Fally. It wasn’t a distinct spark like hers or Nastia. It was more like static, as if he’d been rubbing his feet on a shag carpet before coming inside. She could literally feel his anger.

  Then again, there might be nothing electrical about him. He could just be an asshole.

  Instinctively, Denise went into her defensive posture, the wooden staff at ready. “She doesn’t want to see you. Not until court.”

  Fally laughed and pushed the staff away with a flick of his wrist. “You better move it, girl.” He then tried to use his size and barrel right through her. He outweighed Denise by two hundred pounds.

  She wasn’t a laser geisha, but she wasn’t chopped liver either. Denise dodged left, swung her staff expertly and took him down with a single blow to the knee cap. He fell forward. She then used leverage to put the staff over his back, before switching hands and rotating the staff so it was at the base of the man’s skull.

  The museum sculptures wobbled, but none of them fell over.

  “You were saying,” Denise said to the man beneath her.

  Nastia hurried over to the door, after steadying one or two sculptures.

  “Oh my god, don’t kill him,” Nastia said, shocked. “How did you do that?”

  “Practice,” Denise said. She’d taken a week-long “women’s self-defense course” from someone who claimed to have trained with the late women’s MMA fighter Heidi Hawk. It might actually have been the Heidi Hawk in the flesh hiding her identity.

  The instructor had told her to never take her eyes off an opponent, but Nastia now touched Denise on the arm. “Let him go,” Nastia said.

  “Are you sure?” Denise asked.

  “I still love him,” Nastia whimpered. “I don’t want to see him anymore, but I don’t want him locked up or dead.”

  Denise lifted the tip of the staff but did not lend a hand to help the man up.

  Jumping up with surprising dexterity, he now tried to tackle Nastia. Denise spun her staff around one more time and tripped him. Fally fell so hard that a vase did fall off of its perch and landed on top of his chest. The vase didn’t break.

  Denise held her staff an inch from his eye. Fally whimpered, and gently put the vase on the floor.

  “Who the hell are you?” Fally asked.

  “Laser Geisha Law, it’s what we do. I’m representing Nastia in court, tomorrow.” Denise had been careful to say “law” and not “lawyer.” She was a laser geisha not a lawyer after all. “Are we cool?”

  “We’re cool, geisha girl.”

  She let Fally up but kept the staff at the ready. “This isn’t the last of this.” Fally said as the door closed behind him. “See you in court. You better stay the hell out of our way, little girl.”

  “See you in court,” Denise said to the closed door.

  Nastia wiped away a tear. “Thank you. Sometimes I have mixed feelings about him, he provided for me for a while. But I know I should never have let him into my life. And I hate his damn family, they’re worse than a gang.”

  That would explain the tattoo. Denise had a bad feeling about these Groundlings, whoever or whatever they were.

  “You’re still going to testify in court, right? If you don’t get that restraining order extended, he’ll kill you. I can’t be around all the time.”

  Nastia shivered. “I guess I have to.”

  Denise helped Nastia put the vase back on its pedestal. Hopefully no one else would notice the slight crack near the lip. She turned it so the crack faced the rear. Denise looked around. “Is this all on surveillance camera?”

  “I shut them off during my shift. Let’s just say this has happened before.”

  The two of them cleaned up the rest of the museum. Denise’s skills with the staff helped her in wielding a mop. After they were done for the evening, they sat on a bench in front of Nastia’s painting. Nastia’s electric field had finally dissipated, she was finally relaxed. Even the painting lightened in color. Denise knew she had to tread lightly.

  “You said you knew my family—my mom, and my brother?”

  Nastia nodded. “I knew your mom like a million lifetimes ago. We were friends when you were born.”

  This time Nastia’s painting vibrated on the wall. Was Nastia doing that, or Denise? “And you knew my brother? We were separated at birth. I didn’t even know he was alive until a year ago.”

  “Denny?”

  “He still goes by that name, good. You know him?”

  “I was like his stepmother. I was the one who took him on the day he was born. On the day you both were born.”

  Chapter 6

  Denise felt Nastia’s field spiking up again, the painting growing darker again like a discount Dorian Gray. “Are you OK?” she asked.

  “I’m starving,” she said. “I can tell you over dinner. I’ve always wanted to go to the Oil Baron.”

  They got in the Lexus—Denise’s first passenger ever—and Denise drove the woman to the Oil Baron, the nicest place in Roswell. On the outside, the building looked like an adobe palace designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Inside, the marble bar with brass railing could pass for a private country club’s bar in Dallas, not that she’d ever been to one.

  It was late, but they could order food at a table near the bar. The middle-aged white men in bolo ties and cowboy hats were doing million-dollar deals over a whiskey sour or two or three. The hostess, who could pass for a young Dolly Parton, gave the two women a dirty look after she seated them. “Are you sure y’all will be umm… comfortable here?”

  “I’m her lawyer,” Denise said. “We’re talking about a case.”

  Denise flashed the magic credit card.

  “Of course,” the hostess said. A Korean Swan Bank credit card explained everything. She left them with the dinner menus. “We got some surf and turf specials tonight in the insert.”

  Denise went with the salad bar. Nastia went for the surf and turf “deluxe” and had to ask the waitress what the “turf” meant.

  Denise gave the poor woman a quick lesson in etiquette, to no avail. “There’s like two different forks?” Nastia asked.

  Nastia nearly choked on the surf portion of the meal, the lobster, which she attempted to eat without cracking the shell. This woman had raised her brother?

  Nastia kept waving away Denise’s questions, until the meal was done. “So, what do you want to know?” Nastia asked.

  “How did you know my family?”

  Nastia spit out some lobster tail onto a napkin and then left it on the table next to her plate. Denise frowned. Wasn’t there a scene in Pretty Woman like this? Nastia was no longer pretty of course.

  “I had known your mother off and on until she ran off with that Dan Shepard lawyer guy and everyone thought she was dead. Then she was living with your Aunt Luna and Luna was representing her on all those charges. You know your m
om was charged with murder?”

  “My mom was innocent.”

  “The charges were just dropped,” Nastia said. “As someone whose been through the system as many times as I have, there’s a difference.”

  Denise said nothing. She had Googled her mother many times of course and knew that her Aunt Luna had won her mother’s case and cleared Jen Song’s name. Her mother had always told her that it was “no big deal,” and Denise tried never to give it another thought.

  Nastia cracked open another piece of lobster with her teeth. “I also knew your late father, Mr. Dellagio. He was a lawyer too. He died before you were born.”

  She didn’t care much about the other side, her father’s side, of the fractured family tree. They had abandoned her back then, so she had abandoned them.

  Nastia was pouring back shots of expensive whiskey. She had one too many and lost her grip on the shot glass. It skittered off the table and broke on the floor.

  “That should do it for you for now,” the waitress said, not bothering to sweep up the broken glass.

  “Uno mas? For the one that just spilled.”

  Denise nodded and pointed to her purse, indicating that she had this expense covered. The waitress complied and brought one more.

  Nastia was red faced and smiling. Time to strike. “So how did you get involved with my brother?” Denise asked.

  “I was the one who rode the bus with your mom down to the border to meet your grandfather when she was pregnant with you guys. I didn’t want to risk going across the border those days, because I was a parolee and Border Patrol can be weird about that at the check point. I waited on the American side while your mom met up with your grandfather. Your mama went into labor on this side, just to make sure you’d both be like citizens.”

  Her mother had never mentioned this part of the story, but she knew a vague story of her birth. Her late grandfather, a doctor, had delivered her on the American side and Denny had died in birth. Or so everyone had thought.

  “You were there, like right there, when I was born, when we were born?”

  “Jen Song, I mean your mama, had left her phone on the Mexican side, and I was a contact. I guess your other aunt, what was her name… Selena, called me and said where they were going back to the American side, in El Paso. She wanted me to pick your mama up or whatever, just in case.”

  “Seriously? I never heard that.”

  “I found them in El Paso in a parking lot, found you both there, but it was crazy. There were cop cars everywhere and like I said, I had a warrant in Texas that I didn’t tell your mom about. I watched your grandfather, the Mexican doctor, deliver both of you in the back of a station wagon. I heard your mama say Denny’s name and then say your name Denise.”

  “I knew that much.”

  “Well here’s where the story gets weird. It seemed like your baby brother was dead, but I held some water to his lips and then he came to life, and your mama nodded at me so I could keep him.”

  “Keep him?”

  Denise stared at this strange old woman and the mangled lobster parts and broken glass. The story made no sense. A woman hiding in an alley witnessed her birth and that of her brother. Her brother supposedly didn’t make it. That might be true. An ambulance was about to take a dead baby to the morgue, but this crazy Eskimo just snuck over and gave him a cup of dirty water while no one was looking? The baby came back to life, and her mother allowed this woman to take said miracle baby?

  “He probably wasn’t really dead, just like dehydrated or something,” Nastia said.

  “But then my mother told you that you could keep Denny when you found out that he was really alive?”

  “Something like that. She just gave me like a nod as she drove away in an ambulance.”

  “Why did you keep my brother once he was alive?”

  “He was reaching out to me, with his mind. He wanted to be rescued. And your mama nodded, so it was cool.”

  “My mom probably was in pain after labor and didn’t know what she was doing,” Denise said.

  “She even signed away the rights. Here I still got the papers if you don’t believe me.”

  Nastia handed her some documents she kept in a purse, as if she was waiting for this moment. One was an El Paso, Texas birth certificate listing the live birth of a baby named “Denephew Solzhenitzen,” with a “Nastia Solzhenitzen” as the birth mother. They didn’t do DNA tests back then. And apparently Nastia used the name of a Russian novelist. She had some literary appreciation at least.

  The next document was some kind of termination of parental rights signed by her mother, and notarized, dated a few months after the birth. She recognized her mom’s signature and it was witnessed by a lawyer, her Aunt Luna.

  The form was filed in some county in Texas. Denise knew nothing about family law, especially not in Texas. Why would her mother agree to this?

  “Let me see that. Denise touched the paper and sensed that it was legitimate, not quite the same thing as legal.

  “You lied to my mother to get her to sign.”

  Nastia’s field sparked up again. The TV flickered and for a moment the cable blacked out. The oil men swore at the screen.

  “The game went off!” an oil man shouted.

  The game came back on, and both women leaned back from each other. Nastia wiped away a tear from her red cheeks.

  “I couldn’t have kids,” she slurred her words. “And Denny was so beautiful back then. He needed me. He wanted me to take him. I saved him! And once your mama found out about it, she was cool. See right there, she signed over the rights.”

  Exasperated by the two women, the oil men now left the premises hopefully to close their deal somewhere else in the barony. Denise didn’t even notice.

  “So, what did you do once you got him?” she asked Nastia. “And it was legal, allegedly.”

  “I raised him. In Mexico at first, just to hide out. I had an old boyfriend over there. Then I made everything legal, sort of. When things settled down, we moved out to Roswell, then Las Cruces, then Deming and then finally to Lordsburg where he spent the rest of his time. I got a job at a truck stop there. That was when I hooked up with Fally.”

  She didn’t have to say what she meant by working the truck stops.

  “But I know you saw my mother after that, and you didn’t let her know what happened?”

  “I wanted to bring it up, but I sorta lost Denny too when I got sent up to prison the first time, and then I got paroled up to Albuquerque. First with Fally.”

  “With Fally’s family? That guy who just tried to kill you?”

  “I was headed back to prison. Fally was the closest thing to a father figure back then. He was there for your brother till he went back to prison himself.”

  Her brother was raised by that obese man Denise had just put on the floor. Her dinner stirred up inside her.

  “What happened after that?”

  “That was only for a while,” Nastia said. “As part of my parole, I wasn’t allowed to have no contact with him. Then he got raised by our neighbor Cordelia’s family at the New Shakespeare Ranch. The Dunsinanes. They were rich folks back then. Well rich for Lordsburg. I had to leave him with them when I went to prison the last time. It was for the best.”

  Nastia was crying. The Oil Baron was now empty of oil and barons. “Can you forgive me?”

  Denise didn’t answer at first. Without Nastia, Denise would never learn about Denny. “What was he like? My brother?”

  “Denny was gifted. He could do anything he put his mind to. He even wrote for the paper.” Nastia listed Denny’s accomplishments: school, athletics, joining the military etc. She even showed Denise a picture of Denny winning the middle school state championship in wrestling at eighty-eight pounds of pure muscle.

  Denise smiled. God what they could have done together, supporting each
other.

  “Can you take me to him?” Denise asked.

  Very long pause. “I can help you find him,” Nastia said. “I think Old Man Dunsinane just died, but I know where their ranch is over in Lordsburg.”

  “Is his legal name Denny Song?’

  “No, that’s what’s weird. All the paperwork got fucked up in the system and then they had that computer hack. I’m like part Russian and my real name is Solzhenitsyn like the writer, but none of them clerks knew how to spell it, and then the Dunsinanes came in, so his real name is like Denny Solzhenitsyn-Dunsinane. But like I said, no one knows how to spell it.”

  That explains why she could never find him when she tried to use Google or even combing through official state records.

  Denise felt an incredible rush. This was finally going to happen.

  Nastia put her hand on Denise’s wrist and squeezed. “You have to win my case first.”

  “Can you at least give me his phone number?”

  “But you said…”

  Dan Shepard once said the three worst words a lawyer could hear from a client were “but,” “you,” and “said.” There was a quid pro quo.

  “OK. I’ll help you first,” Denise quickly said.

  It was all catching up to Nastia, the stress, the spark and the alcohol. “Can you take me home so I can rest before court tomorrow?”

  Some more well-heeled patrons entered the bar but turned around once they saw the weeping, wobbling Nastia.

  “Why don’t you spend the night with me at the hotel?” Denise knew she had to say, “In double beds.”

  Denise touched the woman, and Nastia opened her eyes wide. “OK.”

  Denise paid the bill up front with the magic card and left a fifty percent tip. “Please don’t come back here again,” The hostess said.

  “Are people complaining about my client?”

  “No, they’re complaining about you. You make people feel uncomfortable.”

  Maybe it was her spark, but Denise had heard this before. She could never grasp why people didn’t feel comfortable around her.

  As they walked outside, Denise helped Nastia keep her balance. In the Lexus, with Nastia sprawled on the back seat, Denise drove them up Main Street to one of the nice chain hotels—Holiday Comfort, or something like that.